Bill Clinton, Then and Now: The Esquire Interview

In a sprawling discussion of his past and our common future, the former president compares his administration's early years with Obama's and talks about what he believes — in health care and next year's midterms — is about to happen

In his most extensive interview since Barack Obama took office, former president Bill Clinton predicts that Obama will win passage of health-care reform, urging the Democratic party to "stand and deliver" while the Republicans are "in la-la land."

Endorsing Obama's push for health legislation, Clinton tells Esquire executive editor Mark Warren that Democrats should ignore opposition from the GOP. "The president's doing the right thing. It is both morally and politically right," Clinton says. "I wouldn't even worry about the Republicans. I'd worry about executing.

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''Do I think he's doing the right thing, even though he's jamming a lot of change down the system? I do," Clinton says. "So there's a lot that's like my first year, but it's going to have a different ending — he's going to get health-care reform."

In the interview, which appears in the October 2009 issue of Esquire, the former president also talks candidly about his own efforts to reform health care fifteen years ago, about the Supreme Court decision that resolved the 2000 election, about the state of the Republican Party and the prospect for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.

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Highlights from Esquire's exclusive interview:

On Obama's Health-Care Plan

"What I'm more worried about is our people getting careless, forgetting the experience of '94, and that it is imperative that they produce a health-care bill for the president and make it the best one they can; if it's not perfect, we'll go back and fix it. But the people hire you to deliver."

"This electorate has suffered. They've suffered economically, they've suffered an enormous amount of sort of psychic insecurity from 9/11 to the economic breakdown, they've seen all this change going on around them, and they see in Obama a cool and intelligent guy who can multitask in a world where they know you've got to multitask. What they don't know is whether our guys are going to stand and deliver. And sooner or later you've got to stand and deliver. All we have to worry about is getting things done and doing them as well as we can. Don't even worry about the Republicans. Let them figure out what they're going to stand for. 'Cause as long as they're sitting around waiting for us to mess up, they don't have a chance."

On the Defeat of His Own Health-Care Plan

"Almost everything anyone today writes about this stuff is wrong. It's a classic example of how in a war, the victors get to write history.

"Basically, everybody who writes about this stuff today repeats the health-insurance lobby's line from 1994. Like: "The bill was long and complicated." The bill took out four hundred more pages of federal law than it put in. They say we forced a bill on Congress — untrue. I asked Congress to write the bill, and Chairman [Dan] Rostenkowski [of the House Ways and Means Committee] demanded that Hillary send him a bill — a complete bill. He said, "I won't take it up if you don't. We don't know enough about it, the interest groups will eat us alive, we'll modify your bill, but you've gotta send us a whole bill." It was the demand of the most important committee in the House of Representatives. And yet I've read over a hundred stories saying what a terrible mistake we made, it was all our doing. We did what Congress asked us to do. We also got two bills out of two committees for the first time ever. Harry Truman tried to do this, Richard Nixon tried to do it, Lyndon Johnson didn't even try, with the biggest congressional majority in history. He didn't even try — he quit at Medicare and Medicaid, because he knew how hard it was..."

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"And we now know, and I'm surer of this than anything: We just couldn't do [health-care reform] as long as Bob Dole was running for president. He's a good guy, and he's a friend of mine, and the whole time I dealt with him, the only time he was not as good as his word was on this. After Rostenkowski had asked for a bill, I personally asked Bob in the Cabinet Room if we could sit down and write a bill together and send a joint bill to the Congress. Because he was really good on health care for a Republican, cared about it, and he said, 'You know, you need to send a bill in and we need to produce a bill, so that people know there are differences between the two parties and our approaches. Then we'll get together and compromise it out.' When he said that, I think he believed it. Then he gets Bill Kristol's famous memo that says, you know, If you let Bill Clinton pass any kind of health-care bill, the Democrats will be the majority party for a generation, and you can forget about your presidential hopes. Your only option is to beat anything. Kill it off."

On Republican Attacks on Obama

"The thing that I think is wrong and dumb about this is that they're in la-la land about this 'Where was Obama born?' and all that kind of stuff, and I think it sounds like an old record with a bad scratch in it.

"Look, as a Democrat, let them have at it. But for America's sake, what they should be doing is saying, 'Why aren't they buying what we're selling?' First of all, nothing lasts forever, no theory of the case lasts forever, time moves on. So their message won't fly because the circumstances of America are different, the demography of America is different, the psychology of America is different... It's so plainly out of whack with what you perceive the reality of the day and the challenges that we face. We've got 9 percent of all eligible homeowners in America having their mortgages rewritten — 9 percent — and you're talking to me about where Obama was born? Give me a break. I mean it's like, what is this?

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"As Democrats, we should let them wander around in this wilderness as long as they'd like. We still have a serious responsibility to pass health-care legislation, to pass climate-change legislation, keep working around the edges on this economic crisis, do something that will work on this home-owners thing. We've got to do something that will really get us there. And support the President. Do something that will really get this stuff done and then be willing to be judged by the consequences of what we do."

On the 2000 Election

"George Bush ran a brilliant campaign in 2000 — that compassionate-conservative thing was just brilliant — and it got him close enough that he got into the Supreme Court and they issued what I think is one of the five most reprehensible decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. And they were embarrassed about it, because if you read the decision, it says, 'Now, unlike our other decisions, this has no precedential value; you can never cite this decision in any other case for the rest of eternity, this is only a one-off.' I mean, they know better. They knew better than to do what they were doing — it was just a pure, naked political deal, but anyway, it happened and Gore was a good man and he honored the traditions of America and he thought the principle of judicial review and the role of the Supreme Court was important enough not to attack it, and he took it in good grace."

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On the Alternate History of the 2000 Election

"I think if Al Gore had become president... first of all, let me inject a little humility here: No one knows. But for example, as Colin Powell said when he was secretary of state, our policies with North Korea had led us back from the brink, and we were on the verge of getting a total ban on these missile flights and completing the total denuclearization of the peninsula. I expect that would've happened, and if that had happened, I think it is highly likely that the kind of tensions we've seen in the past few months, including the situation involving those two young women, they might not have happened."

"I think he would've had a much more vigorous Securities and Exchange Commission. Could some of this have still happened? Maybe, but we were up on some of this in 2000, up on Capitol Hill, warning that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were getting overexposed, and their real problems didn't happen until four years after that. So I think whatever happened in the economic downturn would've been less.

I'm reluctant, because I was not there, to talk about the run-up to 9/11, but I can always say this: Al Gore was hypervigilant in his following of the intelligence reports and very solid in his understanding of the defense and security policy, and I think he would've done a really good job. I think that he would have been reluctant to fight a war on two fronts; I think he would've tried to finish the business with Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and let the UN inspectors finish what they were doing in Iraq. So yeah, it would've been a very different time."

Click ahead for the complete Esquire interview

Joe McKendry

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In early August, forty-eight hours after returning from a sensitive mission to North Korea that freed the American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, Bill Clinton ambles into the sitting room of his house in Chappaqua, New York, in jeans and sneakers. About to turn sixty-three, looking fit and a little bleary from the week's exertions, he sits down to talk about the legacy of his presidency. The occasion is a new book by Pulitzer-winning writer Taylor Branch, who met in secret with Clinton at the White House starting in October 1993, and almost every month of his presidency thereafter. The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President will be published in October. Clinton has now been out of office longer than he was in, and his perspective on that time is what we've come to talk about. But his views on the present quickly asserted themselves as well.

ESQUIRE: Nine years ago, just as your presidency was coming to an end, you told Esquire that you described one of your achievements as a return to presidential activism. Can you give us your assessment of that activism now, with the perspective of time?

BILL CLINTON: I think that's still true, and I also thought my presidency rescued the reputation of government. Keep in mind, the Republican ascendancy in national politics that began with Nixon's election in '68 really began with their massive gains in the congressional races in 1966 and was based in the beginning on the social debate — the silent majority, the tensions over race, over the war, with women, all of those things. Then when Reagan came along, he reinforced all that but also had a wholesale assault on government. The EPA was terrible, trees actually caused pollution; the Agriculture Department was crazy, ketchup was a vegetable. The whole idea was that government would mess up a two-car parade, therefore the only thing it was good for was cutting taxes, laying concrete, and supporting the Defense Department.

And so they had this — it was more nuanced than that of course — but the whole idea was to divide the American electorate in ways that worked to their advantage and then make the people deeply suspicious of anything the government did. So then what I tried to do was take the rhetoric they had used and flip it to show that they said they were for a balanced budget, but they actually quadrupled the deficit, the debt of the country; they said they hated government waste, but look at the waste of the Defense Department, and that we could actually have a smaller, more efficient, but far more active government that dealt with the problems of the late twentieth century. And I tried to promote a vision of reconciliation and community that would go behind their politics of division. And I tried to reverse the income inequality that had been getting much worse since the 1970s. In a funny way, their policies made it worse, but that helped their larger argument that government couldn't do anything.

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So I was essentially trying to launch a new progressive era by reigniting government activism tailored to the realities of the late twentieth century. And to get us pointing into this new era in a way that would bring people together both politically and economically and put the country back in a position to lead the world for peace and prosperity. And I think, you know, we did pretty well with that. We had this huge reaction election in '94 because they weren't over their government cynicism and the turnout was low, and the Democrats, you know, we couldn't pass health-care reform for the simple reason that the Republicans had a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate.

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Incidentally, almost everything anyone today writes about this stuff is wrong. It's a classic example of how in a war, the victors get to write history.

Basically, everybody who writes about this stuff today repeats the health-insurance lobby's line from 1994. Like: "The bill was long and complicated." The bill took out four hundred more pages of federal law than it put in. They say we forced a bill on Congress — untrue. I asked Congress to write the bill, and Chairman [Dan] Rostenkowski [of the House Ways and Means Committee] demanded that Hillary send him a bill — a complete bill. He said, "I won't take it up if you don't. We don't know enough about it, the interest groups will eat us alive, we'll modify your bill, but you've gotta send us a whole bill." It was the demand of the most important committee in the House of Representatives. And yet I've read over a hundred stories saying what a terrible mistake we made, it was all our doing. We did what Congress asked us to do. We also got two bills out of two committees for the first time ever. Harry Truman tried to do this, Richard Nixon tried to do it, Lyndon Johnson didn't even try, with the biggest congressional majority in history. He didn't even try — he quit at Medicare and Medicaid, because he knew how hard it was.

And so I think I had difficulties, but I think, in general, we restored people's faith in government.

ESQ: It does seem like the 1990s was the last time that America truly felt good about itself, that there was not a problem that was beyond our reach. So far in the twenty-first century, we have not necessarily felt that our destiny was ours to determine.

BC: Yeah, well, people believed in possibilities. And almost more than any specific achievement, I thought that was the most important thing. I thought that it was really important to give the American people a sense of what the twenty-first century would be like, what its challenges would be like and what its opportunities would be like, and then to convince them that we could in fact meet them. I think what breaks people is not adversity; what breaks people is thinking that tomorrow is going to be just like yesterday. That's what's numbing — if you think you can't change, you can't be better. And I didn't like that.

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There was an underlying cynicism, like I said, and we had some horrible, horrible incidents. Not just Oklahoma City, but all the survivalists in Michigan, all that. But in the end, you can't love your country and hate your government. You can criticize your country — that's every American's God-given right and 100 percent of us have done it. But I really believe that eventually, we were going to become a country that was not necessarily more liberal but was more communitarian, with the belief that we had to go up or down together, and we would come to realize that our fates are bound up together, and to realize that our government was an important part — not the only, but an important part — of creating a common future that was positive. And that is the kind of majority that we have now.

You could see it, by my second term, that worldview caught up with what we could call the Republican worldview, the one that produced their presidential victories from Nixon in '68 through Bush II. And by 2000, our worldviews were pretty well even, which is why we had a pretty well even presidential race. Both parties had basically about 45 percent. And then when the Supreme Court did what it did, President Bush was in. He later won the 2004 election, but it was the smallest reelection given an incumbent since Woodrow Wilson in 1916, before World War I, and we had never turned out a president in wartime. So by 2006, when the Democrats won big in the congressional races, I remember I told Hillary the morning after the election, I said, "If we don't nominate a convicted felon, our nominee's gonna be president." Because we finally had the communitarian majority that we'd been working on.

And when we achieved parity in my second term, it was only partly due to the performance of the administration. We had a role in it — people thought I was doing a good job and they believed in it — but to be fair, what also happened was that America had grown far more diverse, racially, culturally, religiously, in our shared challenges. You know, there were immigrants in every kind of neighborhood, there were social problems in the suburbs as well as in the inner cities, and we became a highly complicated, interconnected society. And along with that change came a feeling that we are connected to the rest of the world and we can't ignore what they think or feel. I think in the last election, for example, that people liked and admired Senator McCain, but I think people thought Senator Obama was a more modern person. More wired — not just because he was younger — more wired to the interdependent nature of the world and more able to kind of juggle a bunch of different balls at the same time. That's what I tried to do for people. I tried to give people a sense that they could direct their destiny. They might not be in total control. I suppose no one's ever in total control.

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I've reached the age now where hardly a week goes by that some friend of mine doesn't turn up sick with a condition that he or she may not recover from — it's just the rhythm of life, you know what I mean? I don't talk so much about control and life as I used to, but I do think we direct life — we make it better or worse depending on what we do or don't do, how we think or refuse to think.

ESQ: Just after your presidency, history took a very different turn. How different do you think things could've been with different leadership?

BC: Oh, I think a lot of it. I think if Al Gore had become president... first of all, let me inject a little humility here: No one knows. But for example, as Colin Powell said when he was secretary of state, our policies with North Korea had led us back from the brink, and we were on the verge of getting a total ban on these missile flights and completing the total denuclearization of the peninsula. I expect that would've happened, and if that had happened, I think it is highly likely that the kind of tensions we've seen in the past few months, including the situation involving those two young women, they might not have happened. I can't say for sure; no one knows.

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I think that if Gore had been elected, even if Congress had rejected the Kyoto treaty, as they promised to do, we would've kept in the forefront of this climate-change fight, we'd be a little ahead of the goal, and then I think we would've had, uh, an even more — I give President Bush credit for putting a good deal of research into this, but I think if Gore had been president, we would've been creating more green jobs earlier, and it would've mitigated the impact of this economic slowdown.

I think he would've had a much more vigorous Securities and Exchange Commission. Could some of this have still happened? Maybe, but we were up on some of this in 2000, up on Capitol Hill, warning that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were getting overexposed, and their real problems didn't happen until four years after that. So I think whatever happened in the economic downturn would've been less.

I'm reluctant, because I was not there, to talk about the run-up to 9/11, but I can always say this: Al Gore was hypervigilant in his following of the intelligence reports and very solid in his understanding of the defense and security policy, and I think he would've done a really good job. I think that he would have been reluctant to fight a war on two fronts; I think he would've tried to finish the business with Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and let the UN inspectors finish what they were doing in Iraq. So yeah, it would've been a very different time.

But on the other hand, one of the things I've found and that the '94 elections proved is that when I was elected in 1992, the country thought I was in tune with them, and they had abandoned already in their own minds the economic policies of the Reagan years. They wanted us to go back to a balanced budget, they wanted the middle class to have a better deal, they wanted poor people to be able to work their way into the middle class and not be kept out forever. But culturally there was still a certain vulnerability to the politics of division, and there was a certain propensity to believe that government would mess up a two-car parade.

And so in that environment, it may be that I have to take some responsibility for trying to jam so much change down the system at one time, and we wound up being punished in the '94 election both for what we had done — in terms of the economic plan, which had some tax increases, even though most people got a tax cut, not a tax increase, and people hadn't felt it yet improving the economy or reducing the deficit. The Brady bill and assault-weapons ban, which had just come into play, which the NRA used to terrify hunters — and they hadn't been through a deer season yet, so they didn't know that everything the NRA said was false. I mean, I sailed home to victory in '96, and a lot of places voted out their congressman because they knew the NRA had not told them the truth about the assault-weapons ban and the Brady bill. So we got hurt by what we did, and then we got killed by what we didn't do — we didn't pass health care.

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And we now know, and I'm surer of this than anything: We just couldn't do it as long as Bob Dole was running for president. He's a good guy, and he's a friend of mine, and the whole time I dealt with him, the only time he was not as good as his word was on this. After Rostenkowski had asked for a bill, I personally asked Bob in the Cabinet Room if we could sit down and write a bill together and send a joint bill to the Congress. Because he was really good on health care for a Republican, cared about it, and he said, "You know, you need to send a bill in and we need to produce a bill, so that people know there are differences between the two parties and our approaches. Then we'll get together and compromise it out." When he said that, I think he believed it. Then he gets Bill Kristol's famous memo that says, you know, If you let Bill Clinton pass any kind of health-care bill, the Democrats will be the majority party for a generation, and you can forget about your presidential hopes. Your only option is to beat anything. Kill it off.

And keep in mind, the distribution of parties in the Senate was 55 — 45. It wasn't 60 — 40 like we've got now. So when you add the fact that we were taking this up, they had the filibuster votes they needed in the Senate. [Today] one of the reasons you see so many Republicans negotiating is that they know we've got sixty votes with Specter switching. And the Obama people wrote the legislation this year in the budget package, and that's very clever. They wrote it so that they could take health care and climate change out of the ordinary course of business.

I realized too late that I couldn't get the health-care reform through in the ordinary course of business. If I had known in the beginning what I found out once we got into the weeds, I would have told the American people that I could not keep my commitment to them to put this bill up this quick, and that I was going to set up a bipartisan process and they need to realize that Congress as it currently existed would not pass health-care reform. So they needed to listen to the Republicans, and they needed to listen to us, and decide who they agreed with and vote in the midterm elections accordingly, and I would hope they would support our people, but we would respond based on what they did.

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By fighting that against all the odds, without explaining it to people when we realized it, we made all our vulnerable Democrats more vulnerable. It lowered the turnout of our voters, and when we did pass the gun legislation in our budget, it raised the turnout of their voters.

ESQ: Nine years ago, you also told Esquire that you'd learned as president that there's only so much change the system can absorb. Is President Obama now learning that lesson as well? Does this year at all remind you of your first year?

BC: Yeah, but there's never a good time to do something as hard as health care. When I tried and we didn't succeed — but we had built a strong case against the status quo — we were then able to go back and take a lot of the pieces of what was in the reform and try to implement them. And we achieved something that hadn't been achieved for twenty years before or since: We got the inflation rates and health-care costs back in line with inflation. All during the '90s. Now they are three times the rate of inflation, and health-care premiums doubled in the first seven years of President Bush's term. When I started this, we were spending 14 percent of our income on health care, and no other country was spending more than 10. That was the number in '93. In 2009, we're spending 16.5 percent of our income on health care, and no other country is spending more than 11. So the gap is widening, and the competitive disadvantage of this — we were ranked thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh in our quality of health care in the last international survey.

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So the president's doing the right thing. It is both morally and politically right. I went to three hundred towns for Hillary in March, April, and May of last year. Separate towns — I did way more events — but I did small-town America. That's where I feel comfortable and I like to do it and I thought we could get, in a campaign where we were badly outspent, I thought we could get more votes by having her go do the cities and just sending me out to do the country.

I know President Obama heard the same stories I heard. Hillary was in the Autism Caucus in the Senate, and so I didn't give a speech without talking about autism. And I'm telling you, every place I went, all three hundred of these little towns, there was somebody who had an experience with this and could talk about it and would ask, What are we supposed to do? How can we get care for this? Why isn't it covered by our policies? You know, story after story.

So do I think he's doing the right thing, even though he's jamming a lot of change down the system? I do. And he learned from some of the problems that I faced. For example, I am sure he's in favor of reinstating the assault-weapons ban, but he let Congress go on that and said, "Okay, you rural guys, we've got to deal with climate change, we've got to deal with health care, we ought to do this student-loan thing to get our college costs back in line and make it affordable again, so I'll cut you some slack on assault weapons."

So there's a lot that's like my first year, but it's going to have a different ending — he's going to get health-care reform.

ESQ: Your first midterm elections profoundly affected the course of your presidency. So how big is next year?

BC: I think that next year is a big year. Might the president lose seats? He might. Will he lose the Congress? No, I don't think so. I just think that — I don't know what the exact numbers are, but our party's cultural base is bigger than theirs, and it will stay bigger until they develop a more modern approach, until they have their version of the Democratic Leadership Council.

ESQ: How did that happen? How, when they were so dominant for so long, did they become such a narrow, extreme party?

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BC: It happened for two reasons. It happened because America changed and moved away from them. America got more racially, religiously, culturally diverse. It got younger, and it got on the Internet, and it became more interconnected, and people thought in a different way.

The second thing was President Bush was elected with a Senate majority that would do whatever he asked. So for the first time since Richard Nixon won on the silent majority and Ronald Reagan won on his version of dividing America, the public actually got to see what would happen if they did what they'd been talking about. You know, that old Arab proverb that "Life's greatest curse is answered prayers."

So they were preaching to a less-receptive electorate, and they actually had a record where people had seen what had happened when they did what they promised to do. And I think those two things made a huge difference. And that's what you saw in the narrow reelection of '04, the stunning size of the Democratic victory in '06, and the big victory in '08. We had a better candidate, we had better conditions for the challenging party, but the culture had changed. See, we never knew what would really happen if they got to do what they talked about doing, and Bush and his Congress gave 'em the whole dose. It was no different than what Reagan promised, it was just that Reagan couldn't do it.

ESQ: Do you think that we had to go through that pain in order to change?

BC: No, I don't. My honest opinion is that we did not.

The real question is what the memory of those things will mean in the next election — if anything — and the election after that, and I think that depends upon whether the swing voters see those eight years as a product of just President Bush or whether they see that in his foreign and domestic policies he reflected the core of Republicanism.

I think that for our party, I wouldn't think about that now. Every time I do a fundraiser for a Democrat, whether it's a senator or Congressman or governor, I say the same thing. I say, "For forty years, they had a natural advantage over us in presidential politics. And it was only broken once by Jimmy Carter and twice by me, when they got in trouble. When they got in trouble over Watergate, President Carter won, and then they got in trouble with the economy, and I won, and then people liked what I was doing so they gave me another term, but by then America was changing. The hostility toward government was abating.

George Bush ran a brilliant campaign in 2000 — that compassionate-conservative thing was just brilliant — and it got him close enough that he got into the Supreme Court and they issued what I think is one of the five most reprehensible decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. And they were embarrassed about it, because if you read the decision, it says, "Now, unlike our other decisions, this has no precedential value; you can never cite this decision in any other case for the rest of eternity, this is only a one-off." I mean, they know better. They knew better than to do what they were doing — it was just a pure, naked political deal, but anyway, it happened and Gore was a good man and he honored the traditions of America and he thought the principle of judicial review and the role of the Supreme Court was important enough not to attack it, and he took it in good grace.

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But for them to win consistently again, they're going to have to come up with a whole new theory of governing and a set of ideas that are relevant to the majority now, to people like Angel. [The president introduces Angel Ureña, the deputy director of communications for the Clinton Foundation.] Angel looks a lot more like twenty-first-century America than I do, and that's a good thing, and the Republicans don't have anything to say to him right now. Their basic strategy as near as I can tell is to sit around and wait and hope the president screws up. But what I'm more worried about is our people getting careless, forgetting the experience of '94, and that it is imperative that they produce a health-care bill for the president and make it the best one they can; if it's not perfect, we'll go back and fix it. But the people hire you to deliver. This electorate has suffered. They've suffered economically, they've suffered an enormous amount of sort of psychic insecurity from 9/11 to the economic breakdown, they've seen all this change going on around them, and they see in Obama a cool and intelligent guy who can multitask in a world where they know you've got to multitask. What they don't know is whether our guys are going to stand and deliver. And sooner or later you've got to stand and deliver. All we have to worry about is getting things done and doing them as well as we can. Don't even worry about the Republicans. Let them figure out what they're going to stand for. 'Cause as long as they're sitting around waiting for us to mess up, they don't have a chance.

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ESQ: Republican members of Congress are routinely calling Obama a socialist, and worse. How do you account for that? Or how do you account for the "birther movement," for example?

BC: The thing that I think is wrong and dumb about this is that they're in la-la land about this 'Where was Obama born?' and all that kind of stuff, and I think it sounds like an old record with a bad scratch in it.

Look, as a Democrat, let them have at it. But for America's sake, what they should be doing is saying, 'Why aren't they buying what we're selling?' First of all, nothing lasts forever, no theory of the case lasts forever, time moves on. So their message won't fly because the circumstances of America are different, the demography of America is different, the psychology of America is different... It's so plainly out of whack with what you perceive the reality of the day and the challenges that we face. We've got 9 percent of all eligible homeowners in America having their mortgages rewritten — 9 percent — and you're talking to me about where Obama was born? Give me a break. I mean it's like, what is this?

As Democrats, we should let them wander around in this wilderness as long as they'd like. We still have a serious responsibility to pass health-care legislation, to pass climate-change legislation, keep working around the edges on this economic crisis, do something that will work on this home-owners thing. We've got to do something that will really get us there. And support the President. Do something that will really get this stuff done and then be willing to be judged by the consequences of what we do. That's where I was as president. I think when all's said and done, all that matters is whether people are better off when you quit than when you started.

The broad canvas is that the Republicans are trying to figure out whether to keep playing their old songs or try to write a new script. Meanwhile, they're hoping this president will fail, and they're trying to spook the Democrats from the more vulnerable districts into helping him fail. That's their strategy. Our strategy should be to try and work and support the president and try to prove that the message of the 2008 campaign — that we live in an interconnected world, that we have to work together, that we have to reach out even to our adversaries around the world, and we have to rebuild America here at home in a way that works for ordinary people — that that theory can be seen in what we do on health care, on energy, in the banking institutions, on the home mortgages, right across the board. That's what we need to do. When I was president, I knew exactly what I wanted to do every day to bring America together and create a greater sense of opportunity and a larger sense of responsibility and a stronger sense of community.

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I think they've got a good agenda here, and they need to execute it. I wouldn't even worry about the Republicans. I'd worry about executing. We're not going to be facing adversity politically here unless we fail to perform for the American people. And the president's out there working hard, but he can't do this on his own. And you can argue the strategies of health care out there flat around, but if we fail to deal with it, there is no question in my mind that it will be a cross around our neck economically and a stain on our nation's conscience because of the people whom we allow to suffer.

You know, I made a friend in this campaign out of a woman in Richmond, Virginia, who came to see Hillary one night. She brought her oldest son to see me. He was twelve and rather severely autistic, and she had two twins — I don't remember if they were two or three years old — and they were both mentally disabled, they suffered from retardation, and one of them was born with half a heart. And they couldn't get insurance. The kid had to go to the doctor all the time. She had just taken them to the dentist that day, and she described what it was like to take children with retardation to the dentist. She and her husband came with her son, and he had clear manifestations of severe autism, and this woman, she was a lovely woman. Her husband didn't want to talk about how hard it was, he had his pride, and he just sort of walked it off, but she said, You know, my husband's a good man and he quit his job and he had saved money, he had always saved money. And I became eligible for Medicaid so that our children could have care when we ran through all our savings. And because he was an accountant, we were luckier than most people in our situation. But she said, He's a scrupulously honest man, and next week he's going to earn more money than we can earn while staying on Medicaid. So she said, I'm here because I think your wife cares a lot about this. She said, I may be wrong, but I don't know what we did wrong that makes it like this; we can't help it that we have a chromosome that makes it likely that we will have babies with mental retardation — we didn't know that. We can't help it that our kid is part of the trend that we've had triple the number of kids born with autism here in America in the last twenty years. We didn't do anything wrong, and we're doing our best to take care of these kids, and my government tells me that we have to either starve our other kids to get health insurance, or he goes to work to feed them and the one with the heart problem dies. She says, I don't believe that that's right.

And every day, I mean no matter what happened — whether they were trying to impeach me or there was some damn hearing where I was catching hell for something — I tried to get up and I tried to remember somebody like that. That's all the Democrats need to do today. They just need to remember that there's a reason we win: We win when people feel that their country doesn't care about them anymore, and they've got to have a little help, and that we can make a new beginning. And Barack Obama symbolized for a lot of people a new beginning totally wired to the twenty-first century. And all the rest of us, all we have to do is just keep that in mind. We've got to just stand and deliver, over and over and over again. That's what sustained me for all eight years — I didn't give a damn what was in the headlines that day, I just got up and remembered somebody I knew who needed a president and needed us to try and do something, and that's all that matters.

I may think of those two kids getting off the plane two days ago — those two young women, they're not kids, they're my daughter's age — thirty minutes before I die. That's what you think about. The rest of it is all just smoke and mirrors, all that strategizing and stuff. This is just the beginning of a cycle, just like Richard Nixon's election in 1968, this is the beginning of a cycle, and then Reagan caught it and added to their sort of arsenal for maintaining a cultural majority. We have it now, and I waited forty years for it. And if we get all caught up in the politics of it, it will be the worst thing we ever did. All we gotta do is stand and deliver. And I believe that with all my heart. And that's what I tried to do as president.